


Memories - An ESO RP Fic

by grievousGrimalkin



Category: Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Multi, Sexual Slavery, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 00:42:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grievousGrimalkin/pseuds/grievousGrimalkin
Summary: A young mer sifts through the ruins of their old life to find the memories worth keeping.





	Memories - An ESO RP Fic

**Author's Note:**

> Note: The protagonist of this piece prefers they/them pronouns, so I will use them throughout. I've done my best to limit the use of said pronouns strictly to the character to reduce confusion.
> 
> Content warning: This fic is decidedly a rough one. The death of a romantic partner is the crux of the story, and it also includes descriptions (none of the acts themselves are explicitly depicted) of sexual assault and slavery, both work-based and sexual. (Don't worry. I promise things get better for this character from here.)

Memories wash over them as surely as the silence of the empty house. Their footsteps echo in the cavernous hall of the tower, the wolf padding silently beside them.  They’re no poet, but they know a metaphor when they feel one.  
  
They bid the wolf stop and wait, and it does so, obedient as a hound, its rosy eyes following as they mount the steps to the portal to the upper level, whining softly as it catches sight of the tears glinting on their cheeks in the blue light as they ascend.  
  
The bedroom is too much, and they’d known it would be.  They fight to keep their eyes from settling on any one thing as they cross to the dresser and open the top drawer, fishing through the clothes they try not to look at as they search.  
  
Their grasping fingers find it eventually, fumbling as they’ve forgotten the weight of it.  Another sob catches in their throat, but they withdraw the object anyway, turning the heavy black crystal over in their palm.  
  
They’d brought him home in this once, bargained for his soul from the Daedra of life in exchange for their service to Her, returning from Coldharbour, battered and triumphant, for their promised forever.  
  
They press a kiss to the gem and set it atop the dresser, turning to the wardrobe beside and bending, despite the ache of their back, to retrieve the small chest and a satchel that sat at the bottom.  They set both atop the dresser and run their fingers over the carvings on the lid of the small wooden box: Breton knotwork, since he’d gotten it in Evermore to present their necklace properly.  Their hand finds the pendant through the fabric of their shirt as the night he gave it to them washes through their mind.  
  
They’d been preparing for their journey to fetch both his soul and their own back from Coldharbour.  They stood before the mirror, streaking their eyes with the black warpaint of their tribe when he’d come behind them and fastened it around their neck, asking them a question that should have been a promise.  They’d made love together in front of the mirror then, basking in each other’s joy.  
  
Their eyes find to the mirror now in the dimly lit room, and they hardly recognize the reflection as the same person who had celebrated here all those months ago: no warpaint, their eyes raw with tears, the shaved sides of their head left to grow in with dark fuzz, their fringe hanging against their cheek in a tangled, tear-matted mess, and their belly heavy with six months of hope, expectation, and anguish.  They turn away as another sob tears at them, tucking the soul gem carefully in the velvet-lined chest and placing the chest into the satchel, slinging it over their shoulder and returning to the portal.  
  
Their heart pulls them to turn back for one last look at the room where so much good had happened, straying over the bed and over to the pile of pillows and blankets on the floor.  
  
They’d spent their last night together with him there, as the pair did whenever he shifted, leaning back on the bearskin rug as he’d rested his great furred head against their belly, each with the taste of the other still lingering sweetly on their lips.  They ran their fingers gently through his dark fur, humming softly as they lounged in their afterglow, until his tail set to thumping zealously against the pillows, and he’d turned to them, wolfish muzzle curling into a joyous grin as he’d pressed sloppy kisses ecstatically against their lips.

> _You have too many heartbeats._

They drop the satchel by the portal and all but fall onto the bearskin rug, burying their face against the fur, sobbing and hunting for his scent with their now damnably weak senses, the gift given up for the safety of their child...children...Their twins who would never know their father.  
  
He’d left the next morning before they rose, setting breakfast beside them with a note.  One last contract.  A personal one.  A messenger from the Morag Tong had arrived, offering him pay for a kill he’d been slavering for.

> _I’d have told you, but you’d have tried to talk me out of it or to come along.  I want to close this chapter for us all before the children are here, and you’re in no condition to come along.  I’ll be home before you know it._
> 
> _I promise._

And he was.  His old friend from the Tong arrived three days later with an urn, the sobs ripping at him saying more than enough. They invited him to stay and let him drink for the four of them.  
  
They’d badgered the truth out of his friend the next morning: the target, the plan, who’d paid for it, and what happened, and they’d screamed in anguished rage when they’d heard who’d taken another from them, their old slavemaster haunting them once again.  
  
They’d been bound at twelve years old, their family alongside them for a debt their father had owed.  The man who purchased them bought their mother and father too, their sister sold off to her own horrors at the hands of another master. At sixteen, they were offered a proposition in exchange for freedom: bear three children for him and his barren wife, and he would free them and their family.  
  
At eighteen, the night they first bled, he came to them and again every night after until they started to show.  They birthed a daughter, and he began again the next day, every night until they showed, though they produced a stillborn son.   
  
Heartbroken, they begged the master to let them have respite, but he refused, setting their father to work the fields until they again let him have his way with their battered body.  The next day they relented, but the master did not, and their father was worked to death in the fields before they’d again conceived.  A healthy son and the cycle repeated, a second loss, a stillborn girl, and their mother stood up to him.  He struck her, and she fell; she didn’t get up.  
  
He forced them again, the cycle seemingly unending until they began to show once more, praying every day for one more success, one more for their freedom.  But when they produced the third healthy child, another son, he rescinded his promise and put them for sale to remove the threat of discovery, a spent and battered thing at only twenty-two years old.  
  
Their life improved from there, though, freedom with the aid of their long-lost sister, a home and a would-be destiny found among the Zainab Ashlanders, and, eventually, him.   
  
But above and behind it all always loomed the shadow of the abuse, the nightmares and the fear of enduring a pregnancy again, always the threat that he would abandon the children to the life of House-less bastards if his use of his slave ever came to light, the children that were just as much theirs as the pair now within them.  
  
They’d told their husband of this, and the ache for vengeance never truly left him, no matter their assurances that, so long as the old master provided for them, the children were living a better life than they could provide.  
  
They pull the arms of the bearskin around their shoulders, the cold pelt no substitute for the warmth of him, the coarse fur not soft enough to be his nor smooth enough to be the scarified patterns of his arms that their fingers know by rote.  They sob into the fur until their tears are spent, something they feel they’ve been doing hourly for weeks now.   
  
Finally, they straighten up, keeping the fur wrapped around them as they gather their satchel and head back downstairs where the waiting wolf is sitting patiently for their return.  They’d wanted to do this alone, but their sister insisted that they have some company and aid as they retrieve their things, a watchful eye should they need support, one full of compassion yet free of judgement.  The beast gives them what passes for a kind smile, exactly the sort their sister would give them in a moment like this.   
  
For the first week after his death, they’d hoped for the same.  This wolf was formerly the spirit that had shared their sister’s body when she too had the gift.  The beast had escaped the Hunting Grounds to return to her side after she’d sought the cure, hoping for a better afterlife someday.  They’d known it was possible and hoped to no end that his wolf would return to them in the same way, but day after day, night after night, nothing, until they couldn’t help but resign themself to the fact that he was properly gone.  
  
Their eyes wander over to the urn, still sitting on the table where his friend had set it as they tie the satchel to the wolf’s saddle and drape the bearskin over the seat.  They wrap their arms around the big wolf’s neck, the creature that’s all but their sister tucking its chin against their back in the closest it can give to a hug.  They wipe their tears against the wolf’s fur before pulling away and uncinching one of her saddlebags, walking slowly toward the north wing, the wolf settling back down to wait for them again.   
  
They keep their eyes down as they enter the shrine, the great statue of Azura before which they’d once said their vows looming against the far wall.  The Queen of Dawn and Dusk didn’t hold their faith any longer.  Once, the Prince had shown them a destiny, given them hope, but they’d given that back when She’d discovered that the conniving of Her fellows had left the world unready for it, and She’d told them they could have the life they were dreaming of instead.  Goddess of prophecy though She was, She didn’t tell her favorite that that life would only last a few more months.  
  
They cross to the alcove with the candlelit altar with four small containers arranged atop it: two chipped ceramic paupers’ urns and two smaller filigreed canisters no bigger than their palm.  The master’s wife had seen to it that they’d gotten the ashes, their parents in the urns, the two stillborn children in the tiny boxes.   
  
They’d loved her once.  Or thought they had.  The pair of them both at the same man’s mercy, both yearning for a compassion neither never found except in each other.  They knew now that, no matter what, nothing would befall the children as long as the mother was there for them, and even if it did, clearly it wouldn’t for long.  
  
She was the one behind the contract, his friend had told them.  The master’s cruelty had turned back onto her once they’d been sent away, once her affair with them had come to light, but she endured for the children, for the family’s image and the stable future that the vision carried with it.  
  
But then she discovered what that future entailed.  Their eldest, a girl of barely more than nine years old now, was already having a future arranged for her.  The mother had spotted the contracts one night when he’d bent her over the desk, the girl all but signed over as a someday-wife to one of the master’s business contacts, a mer ten times her age.   
  
She resolved herself that night; she knew how her own arrangement had turned out, knew the profound pain of a marriage without respect, of a hard-hearted man who only valued her for what he could make from her and do with her.  She knew too that the will that would be opened in case of his death under suspicious circumstances cut her and the children out of his holdings completely, but anything was better than this.  She would find a way.  
  
And she did.  The Tong were never far and seemed to know when there was a problem they could attend to.  They took her payment and told her it would be done.   
  
The Tong had assigned him the contract.  He’d spoken with his Master of the situation in the past, of the vengeful fire that burned in him, and so, when the contract came, he was the logical choice.  
  
He’d shifted when he’d gone on the attack, the friend told them. His wolf’s hunger for the man’s throat overwhelmed his reason, the great snarling beast, still fresh and foolish, on the hunt for prey too well-guarded.  He went down fast and hard and sudden, and that was the end of it all.  
  
If he had just asked, they’d have told him.  They knew every back-way, every blindspot, every creaky floorboard in the house from all their years of servitude, and all he’d have needed to do was ask, but he was always too brash for that.  
  
The knowledge was useful, of course, when they’d resolved to finish it themself.  They’d dressed in comfortable clothes with a tattered hood to pull over their head and false tail pinned to their skirt.  A pregnant Khajiiti slave didn’t draw notice as they crept through the dark holdings and into the house, walking with a silent familiarity through the old halls.  Before they’d approached his room, they visited the wife’s instead, leaving a single leaf of aloe on her nightstand. They knew she’d remember: those nights balming each other’s wounds with the plant that they’d sneak out and gather together.   
  
They left her to her sleep and paid the master his visit.  Beside his bed, they’d thrown back their hood, their fringe of hair falling around their face to frame it as it used to. When they slashed his wrist with the blade coated in a paralysis poison, he awoke, frozen before he could scream, face locked in stunned recognition at the ghost of his slave looming out of the darkness of his room.

> _You have taken everyone from me.  Again, I am left with nothing.  But now I can leave you with less._

They buried the knife into his chest, striking true for his heart, watching the life bleed out of him before leaving as silently as they’d come.  
  
They stash the urns in the saddlebag, grateful at last to know their losses are avenged, tucking the small boxes safely in alongside.  They heft the bag and return to the wolf, no second-glances for the Mother who’d turned Her back on them.  Back in the main chamber, they heave one last sigh and cast one last look, before settling his urn into the other saddlebag and guiding the wolf back out to the steps to wait.  
  
The will was read yesterday, the mother and her children left without a home, the master’s holdings passed to a cousin of scant relation.  As the four of them had crossed the gate to leave their home for the last time, a messenger had found them, presenting the mother with an unsigned note, a pouch of coin, and the deed to a small island south of Sadrith Mora.  He offered to guide them there the next day, stating that the coin was for food and lodging for the night.  The mother would have doubted him but his charming manner put the children at ease, just as the aloe leaf peeking pointedly from his pocket and the knowing wink from him when she spotted it did for her.  
  
So, now they wait, their husband’s friend guiding their children and the mother alongside to her new home, where they’ll explain that they’re providing the future for their children that they’d always been unable to provide, dealing their family a better hand than the one the master could offer.  
  
They know, for now, that they’ll find other things.  They always have.  It will be agonizing for a good long while, but they’re resilient and strong and have plenty to live for.  Loved ones known and yet to know.  The past hurts, and it always will, but they’ve been turned on the wheel enough to know that, someday, they’ll find themself on top again.   
  
The gate opens then, and as it closes, they feel in their heart that the next chapter’s begun.  Well...they’re no poet, but they still know a metaphor when they feel one.


End file.
